Museo di San Marco Florence Guide 2025: Fra Angelico and the Meditative Cells

How Savonarola used Fra Angelico's cells to plan the Bonfire of the Vanities — and the specific irony of that location

Girolamo Savonarola (San Marco prior 1490-1498 — the Dominican friar whose decade at San Marco represents the most dramatic single episode in the building's history): the specific historical irony is structurally perfect. Fra Angelico created the San Marco cell frescoes between 1438 and 1445 as the most precisely engineered devotional painting program of the 15th century — the paintings designed to form souls in the specific Dominican contemplative tradition. Fifty years later, the prior who occupied those same cells used the San Marco pulpit as the platform for the most aggressive attack on Renaissance visual culture in the century: the Bonfire of the Vanities (1497-1498) destroyed Botticelli paintings, Petrarch manuscripts, mirrors, carnival costumes, and a specific category that Savonarola called "superstitious false devotion objects" — which by any reasonable reading would include the very type of devotional image that Fra Angelico had created for the San Marco cells. The paradox: the most theologically sophisticated devotional painting program of the Renaissance was created in the building from which the most systematic attack on Renaissance culture was organized by a successor Dominican in the same tradition. Savonarola was burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria in May 1498 — the same piazza where he had organized the Bonfire of the Vanities the previous year.